Monday, March 03, 2008

Nostalgic nights at the bar with people you haven't seen in years are interesting because for whatever reason my memories never match anyone elses' memories.

Remember the time we went to Seattle in 2000 and stayed at a crappy motel and found that they had given one of the rooms we had booked to someone else but we couldn't really go and complain because we were trying to fit six or eight people in that room.

After much haggling we ended up with some sort of family suite with two beds in the one room and one in the other room which was perfect because we didn't have to sleep on the floor unlike some of the other people in some of the other rooms.

I got to stay in the one room with the SFU girls who were a lot older than me and Irina and Jo took the bed in the other room because they were being antisocial or leaving me out of things or something. But lucky for me the university girls were a hell of a lot of fun. We decided that the sheets on the bed didn't seem very clean so we started stripping them off in a fit of giggling.

Irina and Jo heard us from the other room and they came in to see what we were doing and found that we had nearly stripped the sheets down to the mattress (which didn't look overly clean either when we got to it). They decided that they wanted to join in so they took all the sheets off their bed and started to drag their matress into the room, only to find that there was a stack of pornography between the matress and the box spring.

The reactions in the room ranged from horror to shreiks to hoots of laughter. A couple of people were decidedly offended so we called room service...

...only to suddenly realize that that might not be a good idea. After all, there were more of us in the room than we had paid for, we were standing around in our underwear and the beds were completely torn apart, the sheets all over the place and one matress was half on the floor.

Someone flicked the offending magazines underneath one of the beds and in a flash we were all in motion: trying to put the beds back together and throwing on clothing. Room service found us in the middle of this. I have no idea how we looked but it was certainly not normal and nonchalant.

He was tall, thin, gawky, awkward in his movement. He stood at the door for a while, trying to understand what was happening. We didn't really give him a chance to figure it out. He was shooed in and then shooed out and then we were safe, and it was time to go to bed.

Do you remember that? I guess not.

But still, it's nice to spend time catching up with people, even if you don't remember the same things. It's good to find out what people are doing these days and hear the story about how exactly the rowing club imploded after we left. It's also fun to have someone at your table win the door prize - a pair of white boxers, size XXL.